The Consumers’ Foundation yesterday accused Premier Wu Den-yih (吳敦義) of turning a blind eye to unreasonable housing policies, such as counting the area covered by a canopy roof as part of the property area.
The consumer rights watchdog had previously attacked real estate brokers and construction companies for inflating the advertised surface area of a property during the selling process.
The group said the surface area should be calculated according to the size of the area contained inside the outer walls, rather than starting at the middle point of the outer walls, as stipulated by the Ministry of the Interior’s Construction and Planning Agency, or the outermost border of the outer walls as stipulated by the ministry’s Department of Land Administration.
Other tricks property sellers often use to fool home buyers include counting the area taken up by pillars, rain shutters, balconies, emergency escapes and ladders, parking spaces and power and other utility installations, the foundation said.
Foundation chairman Hsieh Tien-jen (謝天仁) said that a 50 ping (165.3m²) property can be inflated by an additional 1.5 ping if realtors count the area covered by canopy roofs, which could hike the property’s price by as much as NT$1.35 million (US$40,000) if the property is located in Taipei City’s Da-an District (大安).
Hsieh said the Control Yuan had censured the Ministry of the Interior on Sept. 3 last year for failing to promptly revise building registration regulations, but that it should now censure the Cabinet for failing to improve the situation.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching